Re: Crappy Pay - WHY???

   Steve,

   I think you're right to be angry. The pay topic recurs here
as
   in grit world, and too often subsides to whimpers as though
   nothing can be done. We should discuss here specifics about
how
   to negotiate favorable transactions.

   As a beginning: as an architectural employer and sometime
   professor for three decades, I suggest that you never take
at
   face value what an employer, or a professor, or a client,
tells
   you about why you cannot be paid better -- especially those
who
   are famous and offer non-cash rewards. Cheating, lying and
   dissimulation in business is the norm, and increases with
   notoriety. And since education, like architecture, is a
   primarily a tool of economic intercourse, the architectural
   professoriate, like the profession, is obliged to cosmetize
   young architects' prospects to increase the profit margin of
   their own. Again, the more famous the school, the greater
the
   self-serving complicity -- it's the grand tradition.

   Young, all, architects would benefit from studying business
   journals, and their frequent reports on the all-too-common
   world of fraud and deception, how to hide it, how to deny it
   when caught, how to negotiate city-comfortably with crooks
   (Mr. Sucher will cheerlead us), in school, in practice and
   on the high road to eternal fame and glory, as Leb Woods
   belly-laughs it. Here's a sample:

   -----

   Wall Street Journal, March 26, 1996, pp. C1, C15.


   For Many Executives, Ethics Appear to Be a Write-Off

   By Dawn Blalock


   A typical executive is m his mid-40s, frequently travels on
   business, says he values "self-respect," and is very likely
   to commit financial fraud.

   That, anyway, is the conclusion of four business school
   professors, whose study on fraud was published in the
   February issue of the Journal of Business Ethics.

   After getting nearly 400 people (more than 85% of them men)
   over the past seven years to play the role of a fictional
   exec named Todd Folger, the professors have found that 47%
   of the top executives, 41% of the controllers and 76% of
   the graduate-level business students they surveyed were
   willing to-commit fraud by understating write-offs that cut
   into their companies' profits.

   Such behavior isn't just the stuff of academic experiments.
   Failure to properly report write-offs is one of the most
   common types of fraud investigated by the Securities and
   Exchange Commission, according to agency officials. In one
   high-profile case, an SEC administrative law judge ruled
   late last year that the Bank of Boston had neglected to
   write down its deterior.lting real-estate loan portfolio,
   making its earmngs look better than they were.

   The study was based on the "in-basket" tests that are often
   used in personnel evaluation. In this case, "Mr. Folger"
   has just returned from a two-week business trip and now
   confronts a huge stack of paperwork that has piled up in
   his in-basket during his trip. Intermixed with irrelevant
   paperwork are some memos containing important financial
   data. The assignment given participants was to work through
   the in-basket as quickly as possible; Mr. Folger was
   scheduled to leave again soon on a business trip to Japan.

   To lend some authenticity to the study, the professors
   combed through actual SEC cases to come up with scenarios
   in which a person would be confronted with the opportunity
   to hide a write-off or to improperly inflate sales figures.
   And they made sure there was a tantalizing motive by
   suggesting in another memo that Mr. Folger would be up for
   the soon-to-be-retired president's position, based on his
   ability to fatten the bottom line.

   Faced with this temptation, the Mr. Folgers in the study
   repeatedly directed underlings not to disclose write-offs.

   "What I found was really disappointing," says Arthur Brief.
   a professor at Tulane University's Freeman School of
   Business who led the study. Before undertaking the
   research, he believed that people's "individual values"
   make a big difference in how they behave in the workplace.

   "But now I'm convinced that they don't," he ruefully
   concludes.

   If that's so, it doesn't say much for the way experts have
   traditionally tried to attack financial fraud. In the late
   1980s, a handful of private accounting organizations came
   up with a list of recommendations to combat the problem.
   Among the many steps suggested by the Treadway Commission,
   as the group was commonly known, was to hire top managers
   with a strong sense of personal values.

   But Mr. Brief and his colleagues suggest that such an
   approach, at least if done in isolation, misses the mark.
   Before going through their in-baskets, the Mr. Folgers in
   the study were asked to rank 18 values including
   "pleasure," "a comfortable life," "equality" and
   "self-respect." Although those who gave a high rating to
   "pleasure" and "a comfortable life" were slightly more
   likely to commit fraud than those who opted for
   "self-respect," the difference was practically nonexistent.

   Similarly, adopting a code of ethics -- another
   recommendation of the Treadway Commission and a common
   practice at many companies -- was found to have little if
   any, impact on behavior. One version of the in-basket
   included a very specific company ethics policy, another
   included the same policy but couched in vague terms and the
   third version had no policy at all. Although the
   participants who had the specific policy were slightly less
   likely to commit fraud, here, too, the difference was
   minimal.

   Finds Numbers Distressing

   "If there is no way to poke holes in the findings, the
   numbers are very distressing," says James Treadway, a
   former SEC commissioner who headed up the commission
   bearing his name.

   At least some ethics experts say they're shocked by the
   study's findings. Stuart Greenbaum, dean of the Olin School
   of Business at Washington University in St. Louis, says he
   finds the notion that values evaporate so quickly in the
   workplace, "on its face, incredible."

   "Values are deeply held beliefs," says Mr. Greenbaum, who
   wasn't involved with the study. "I don't see anything so
   fundamental to warrant the change" from somebody's home to
   their place of business.

   But other experts who were told of the study's results say
   they're not the least bit surprised. If people "are in an
   environment where there are strong incentives to cheat,
   most people will," says Michael Metzger, a professor of
   business law at Indiana University.

   Beyond the failure to disclose write-offs, 14% of the chief
   executives and 8% of the controllers in the study were also
   inclined to inflate sales figures to meet expectations.

   Ignorance of Improper Behavior

   Some of the tendency to commit fraud may be due to
   ignorance of what constitutes improper behavior. Janet
   Dukerich, an associate professor of management at the
   University of Texas at Austin and one of the study's
   authors, says that's especially true among the M.B.A.
   students. She notes that the group most familiar with
   accounting procedures, the controllers, were the least
   likely to engage in fraud.

   That said, Ms. Dukerich doesn't think the study's results
   are overstated. In fact, she says, they may well be
   conservative. After all, study participants "didn't really
   have their job on the line," she notes.

   In the end, the study's authors say that what is necessary
   to prevent fraud is not only a company's code of ethics,
   but an entire business climate that reinforces ethical
   behavior, a point also made by the Treadway Commission. Mr.
   Brief cites specific means of training, having someone on
   staff such as an ethicist or an ombudsman whom employees
   can turn to -- for guidance, goals and rewards for ethical
   behavior, and a good example set from the top.

   All of this, however, is easier said than done. Concludes
   Ray Hilgert, a management professor also at the Olin
   School: "It is very difficult to show bottom line that you
   are better off making an ethical decision."

   [End]